2/26/2009 @ 12:20PM

America's Rip-Off Airports

At Cincinnati’s main airport, Delta and its affiliates boast an 87% market share. No surprise, then, that it’s a pricey place to fly out of–in fact, it’s the airport with the highest average fare per mile in our survey of 407 airports. (We looked at average fares paid in a Department of Transportation database found at www.transtats.bts.gov.) The expensive offenders on our list generally were big hubs in medium-size cities, where market share dominance translates to prodigious pricing power.

In the 2008 third quarter Cincinnatians paid an average fare of $558 for flights from their airport; the average fare in similarly sized Pittsburgh, whose airport is now just a spoke, was $370. (Delta says it cut some Cincinnati fares in February.) At least travelers in Cincinnati enjoy more direct flights than they would in comparable cities that are not airline hubs. The country’s cheapest airport per mile is Ted Stevens Anchorage International in Alaska. (To be sure, it had a leg up with its long routes, which spread fixed costs such as ticketing over more miles.)